There are any number of explanations as to why Trump took credit for the phrase. He may have been joking. He may have never heard the phrase and independently came up with it. Both are at least somewhat plausible explanations. Still, this is not the first time Merriam-Webster has stepped in to offer a Trumprovement. (See what I did there?)

The verbal arbiter was there when Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway injected “alternative facts” into the American lexicon:

*whispers into the void* In contemporary use, fact is understood to refer to something with actual existence. https://t.co/gCKRZZm23c

The Trump-trolling strategy has boosted the audiences for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and it has done the same for Merriam-Webster. The company has doubled its Twitter following (to more than 465,000 as of this writing) since Trump took office.